Civil Liberties – beSpacifichttps://www.bespacific.com
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:55:05 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9701837212018 Annual Report on People With Disabilities in Americahttps://www.bespacific.com/2018-annual-report-on-people-with-disabilities-in-america/
Thu, 21 Feb 2019 20:27:03 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68232“The Annual Disability Statistics Compendium, Annual Disability Statistics Supplement, and State Reports for County-level Data are web-based tools that pool disability statistics published by various federal agencies together in one place. When working on legislative and other matters relating to persons with disabilities, the Compendium, Supplement, and State Reports make finding and using disability statistics easier. The Annual Disability Statistics Supplement provides hundreds of additional tables breaking down the content found in the Compendium by age, gender, and race-ethnicity. The State Reports for County-level Data provide county-level statistics for each state complimenting the content found in the Compendium and Supplement.”
]]>68232Your phone and TV are tracking you and political campaigns are listening inhttps://www.bespacific.com/your-phone-and-tv-are-tracking-you-and-political-campaigns-are-listening-in/
Wed, 20 Feb 2019 19:20:48 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68208La Times: “…Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages. “We can put a pin on a building, and if you are in that building, we are going to get you,” said Democratic strategist Dane Strother, who advised Evers. And they can get you even if you aren’t in the building anymore, but were simply there at some point in the last six months.

Campaigns don’t match the names of voters with the personal information they scoop up — although that could be possible in many cases. Instead, they use the information to micro-target ads to appear on phones and other devices based on individual profiles that show where a voter goes, whether a gun range, a Whole Foods or a town hall debate over Medicare. The spots would show up in all the digital places a person normally sees ads — whether on Facebook or an internet browser such as Chrome. As a result, if you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns. The information gathering can quickly invade even the most private of moments…”

]]>68208Immigration Court Workload in the Aftermath of the Shutdownhttps://www.bespacific.com/immigration-court-workload-in-the-aftermath-of-the-shutdown/
Wed, 20 Feb 2019 18:02:17 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68206Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse – “The latest available data from the Immigrant Court indicates that as of February 1, 2019 the court is still playing catch up in the aftermath of the five-week partial government shutdown. It is therefore still too early to get an accurate reading of just how much larger the backlog has grown, or how much longer court delays will be before canceled hearings can be rescheduled. Available data thus far indicate that somewhere between 80,051 and 94,115 hearings may have been cancelled. However, many entries for scheduled hearings that weren’t held have yet to be marked as canceled in the court’s records leaving some uncertainty in the final tally. Another troubling indicator of how far court staff are behind is that relatively few new filings were recorded since the shutdown began. Even based on these albeit incomplete records, the backlog has already grown to 829,608. But until new filings are recorded, any new DHS actions seeking removal orders aren’t reflected in this backlog count. After that, huge volumes of hearings will need to be rescheduled. Only then will a proper accounting of the full impact of the shutdown be possible.”

]]>68206Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justicehttps://www.bespacific.com/dirty-data-bad-predictions-how-civil-rights-violations-impact-police-data-predictive-policing-systems-and-justice/
Mon, 18 Feb 2019 22:56:30 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68180Richardson, Rashida and Schultz, Jason and Crawford, Kate, Dirty Data, Bad Predictions: How Civil Rights Violations Impact Police Data, Predictive Policing Systems, and Justice (February 13, 2019). New York University Law Review Online, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN in PDF: “Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using algorithmic predictive policing systems to forecast criminal activity and allocate police resources. Yet in numerous jurisdictions, these systems are built on data produced within the context of flawed, racially fraught and sometimes unlawful practices (‘dirty policing’). This can include systemic data manipulation, falsifying police reports, unlawful use of force, planted evidence, and unconstitutional searches. These policing practices shape the environment and the methodology by which data is created, which leads to inaccuracies, skews, and forms of systemic bias embedded in the data (‘dirty data’). Predictive policing systems informed by such data cannot escape the legacy of unlawful or biased policing practices that they are built on. Nor do claims by predictive policing vendors that these systems provide greater objectivity, transparency, or accountability hold up. While some systems offer the ability to see the algorithms used and even occasionally access to the data itself, there is no evidence to suggest that vendors independently or adequately assess the impact that unlawful and bias policing practices have on their systems, or otherwise assess how broader societal biases may affect their systems.

In our research, we examine the implications of using dirty data with predictive policing, and look at jurisdictions that (1) have utilized predictive policing systems and (2) have done so while under government commission investigations or federal court monitored settlements, consent decrees, or memoranda of agreement stemming from corrupt, racially biased, or otherwise illegal policing practices. In particular, we examine the link between unlawful and biased police practices and the data used to train or implement these systems across thirteen case studies. We highlight three of these: (1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices suggests an extremely high risk that dirty data was or will be used in any predictive policing application, and (3) Maricopa County where despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, lack of transparency and public accountability surrounding predictive policing inhibits the public from assessing the risks of dirty data within such systems. The implications of these findings have widespread ramifications for predictive policing writ large. Deploying predictive policing systems in jurisdictions with extensive histories of unlawful police practices presents elevated risks that dirty data will lead to flawed, biased, and unlawful predictions which in turn risk perpetuating additional harm via feedback loops throughout the criminal justice system. Thus, for any jurisdiction where police have been found to engage in such practices, the use of predictive policing in any context must be treated with skepticism and mechanisms for the public to examine and reject such systems are imperative.”

]]>68180The Secret History of Women in Codinghttps://www.bespacific.com/the-secret-history-of-women-in-coding/
Thu, 14 Feb 2019 19:34:19 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68126The New York Times Magazine – The Secret History of Women in Coding – Computer programming once had much better gender balance than it does today. What went wrong? by Clive Thompson (adapted from “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World,” available March 26, 2019): “When digital computers finally became a practical reality in the 1940s, women were … pioneers in writing software for the machines. At the time, men in the computing industry regarded writing code as a secondary, less interesting task. The real glory lay in making the hardware. … If we want to pinpoint a moment when women began to be forced out of programming, we can look at one year: 1984. A decade earlier, a study revealed that the numbers of men and women who expressed an interest in coding as a career were equal. … From 1984 onward, the percentage dropped; by the time 2010 rolled around, … 17.6 percent of the students graduating from computer-science and information-science programs were women. One reason … has to do with a change in how and when kids learned to program. … Once the first generation of personal computers, like the Commodore 64 or the TRS-80, found their way into homes, teenagers were able to play around with them [before entering college] … By the mid-’80s, some college freshmen … were remarkably well prepared. … [T]hese students were mostly men, as two academics discovered when they looked into the reasons women’s enrollment was so low…”
]]>68126The median gender pay gap: It’s time to tell the whole storyhttps://www.bespacific.com/the-median-gender-pay-gap-its-time-to-tell-the-whole-story/
Thu, 14 Feb 2019 19:12:35 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68124Quartz: “There are gender pay gaps … and then there are median gender pay gaps. Understanding the difference between the two may determine just how much progress women make in terms of fairer compensation in the next decade. So first, the definitions: “Equal pay” gap: What women are paid versus their direct male peers, statistically adjusted for factors such as job, seniority, and geography. Often referred to in the context of “equal pay for equal work.” “Median pay” gap: The median pay of women working full time versus men working full time. This is an unadjusted raw measure used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Women in the US, for example, make 80 cents on the dollar versus men on this basis.

Equal pay gaps measure whether women are being paid commensurate with their peers for the work they are doing today. But median pay gaps measure whether or not women are holding as many high-paying jobs as men. Narrowing the median pay gap means putting more women in leadership (and reaping the performance benefits that diversity affords). And that’s where investors come in. Concerned shareholders in major US financial and tech companies want to make sure the pay gap difference is understood—and acted upon. Consider the case of Citigroup. While it is true that women at Citi are paid 99% of what men are paid on an equal-pay basis when adjusting for job function, level, and geography, the median pay gap at the financial giant paints a very different picture: Women at Citigroup earn just 71% of what the men earn…”

]]>68124A New Americanism Why a Nation Needs a National Storyhttps://www.bespacific.com/a-new-americanism-why-a-nation-needs-a-national-story/
Wed, 13 Feb 2019 00:09:48 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68070Foreign Affairs – Jill Lepore: “…The United States is different from other nations—every nation is different from every other—and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths, “Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.”…

“The history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,” [Stanford historian Carl] Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don’t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They’ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They’ll lament “American carnage.” They’ll call immigrants “animals” and other states “shithole countries.” They’ll adopt the slogan “America first.” They’ll say they can “make America great again.” They’ll call themselves “nationalists.” Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.”

]]>6807012 months, nearly 1200 deaths: the year in youth gun violence since Parklandhttps://www.bespacific.com/12-months-nearly-1200-deaths-the-year-in-youth-gun-violence-since-parkland/
Tue, 12 Feb 2019 23:22:35 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68060McClatchy: “The 12-month period starting Feb. 14, 2018, saw nearly 1,200 lives snuffed out. That’s a Parkland every five days, enough victims to fill three ultra-wide Boeing 777s. The true number is certainly higher because no government agency keeps a real-time tally and funding for research is restricted by law. The Trace, an online nonprofit news organization that covers firearms issues, wanted to commemorate those lost lives. It assembled a team of more than 200 journalists — kids themselves — to research and write short portraits of every victim, 18 and under. On the anniversary of the Parkland massacre, The Trace is publishing those portraits. In conjunction, the Miami Herald and McClatchy are presenting a series of stories on the year in gun violence against children…
When they weren’t taking cover from school shooters, young Americans died as a result of murder-suicides, jealous rages, indiscriminate drive-bys, targeted attacks and horrific preventable accidents. Several died in explosive video game disputes. One young man was killed when, according to a witness, a loose gun inside a box he was hauling discharged. A 10-year-old girl was gunned down while scampering toward an ice cream truck. A father shot his 6-year-old girl by accident while cleaning his gun. Older teens were more commonly victims, followed by small children, ages 2 and 3. Cities were deadlier than rural areas. Although the data collected didn’t include race and ethnicity, it is clear that most victims were minorities in communities awash in firearms. “This is America. Anyone who wants a gun will be able to obtain one and at competitive prices,” said Thomas Hargrove, founder of the Murder Accountability Project, whose searchable website murderdata.org features homicide data and analytic tools. “That’s simply the truth.”..”
]]>68060Scientists Are Totally Rethinking Animal Cognitionhttps://www.bespacific.com/scientists-are-totally-rethinking-animal-cognition/
Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:24:19 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68043The Atlantic – What science can tell us about how other creatures experience the world – “…Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face. For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not…”
]]>68043Discrimination In The Age Of Algorithmshttps://www.bespacific.com/discrimination-in-the-age-of-algorithms/
Mon, 11 Feb 2019 23:18:26 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68027Via NBER – Discrimination In The Age Of Algorithms. Jon Kleinberg, Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Cass R. Sunstein. #25548 [h/t Mary Whisner]

“The law forbids discrimination. But the ambiguity of human decision-making often makes it extraordinarily hard for the legal system to know whether anyone has actually discriminated. To understand how algorithms affect discrimination, we must therefore also understand how they affect the problem of detecting discrimination. By one measure, algorithms are fundamentally opaque, not just cognitively but even mathematically. Yet for the task of proving discrimination, processes involving algorithms can provide crucial forms of transparency that are otherwise unavailable. These benefits do not happen automatically. But with appropriate requirements in place, the use of algorithms will make it possible to more easily examine and interrogate the entire decision process, thereby making it far easier to know whether discrimination has occurred. By forcing a new level of specificity, the use of algorithms also highlights, and makes transparent, central tradeoffs among competing va! lues. Algorithms are not only a threat to be regulated; with the right safeguards in place, they have the potential to be a positive force for equity.”

]]>68027Why data, not privacy, is the real dangerhttps://www.bespacific.com/why-data-not-privacy-is-the-real-danger/
Sun, 10 Feb 2019 23:22:20 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68019NBCNews: “While it’s creepy to imagine companies are listening in to your conversations, it’s perhaps more creepy that they can predict what you’re talking about without actually listening…First, understand that privacy and data are separate things. Your privacy — your first and last name, your Social Security number, your online credentials — is the unit of measure we best understand, and most actively protect. When a bug in FaceTime allows strangers to hear and watch us, we get that, in the same visceral way we can imagine a man snooping outside our window. But your data — the abstract portrait of who you are, and, more importantly, of who you are compared to other people — is your real vulnerability when it comes to the companies that make money offering ostensibly free services to millions of people. Not because your data will compromise your personal identity. But because it will compromise your personal autonomy…

…With 2.3 billion users, “Facebook has one of these models for one out of every four humans on earth. Every country, culture, behavior type, socio-economic background,” [Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.] With those models, and endless simulations, the company can predict your interests and intentions before you even know them…”

]]>68019New Library Bill of Rights Provision Recognizes and Defends Library Users’ Privacyhttps://www.bespacific.com/new-library-bill-of-rights-provision-recognizes-and-defends-library-users-privacy/
Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:06:47 +0000https://www.bespacific.com/?p=68002American Library Association – “The Library Bill of Rights — first adopted in 1939 and last amended in 1980 — has been updated to include an article focused on the concept of ensuring privacy and confidentiality for library users.The new article of the Library Bill of Rights, Article VII, states: “All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.” “Libraries across the nation now have the support needed to protect and fight for the privacy rights of their patrons,” said Erin Berman, chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee’s Privacy Subcommittee and co-leader of the working group that drafted the new article. “They may use the privacy article to update policies and practices, bringing the new article to governing bodies, vendors, funders and their patrons.” Helen Adams, an IFC member and co-leader of the working group, commended the working group and those who contributed to the privacy article. She also noted the article’s significance to school libraries.

“With the addition of Article VII, students in K-12 public schools are promised the right of privacy and confidentiality in their library use,” said Adams. “Adding the core values of privacy and confidentiality to one of the profession’s foundational documents places school librarians in a stronger position from which to advocate for and educate about library privacy for minors.”